Chapter 22 - I'll Be a Home for You

Chapter 22

aang asks me to dig up a grave (i have to, i owe him)

JJ

I put my tray on the table. “Can we crash your lunch?” I smile at Aang and Remy.

Aang nods, his mouth full of noodles. Remy greets Bryn, who sits down next to him. I plop down next to Aang, and Monique takes the seat beside me. After deliberations that spanned about half my usual sleep time, I decided to be extra friendly. Because I am his friend, as he reminded me yesterday. We’re friends. That sounded better at two a.m., but what can you do?

The spot where his lips crashed against my collarbone itches. I ignore it.

I grab my hamburger and start on my second goal for being at this table. “Should we go to Coach after Mathletes practice today and show her the partner stunt?” I take a bite of the burger and try not to gag. Cafeteria food is disgusting. In moments like these, I miss the fresh meals of my Polish public school.

As I force myself to take another bite, I realize no one responded to me. “So? Today after school?” I look between Monique and Aang. “We have Mathletes Invitationals again, so Aang and I are missing training on Thursday. I’d like Coach to see the stunt before that.”

They exchange looks.

“What?” I squeeze my burger.

Aang coughs.

Monique puts down her fork. “Aang and I talked about it this morning …”

My burger now bears a significant imprint of my fingers. When did these two start spending time together without me present? “And what was the outcome of that conversation?” I grit my teeth.

“I know how much you want it, but with the last fall …” Monique starts.

No.

I put the burger down. “I think it should be up to Coach to decide. And the last fall was all my fault. It would have worked if I hadn’t relaxed, and Coach would put a spotter with us during the competition for sure, and you know it would add so much difficulty, and obviously that is most important to win State and get to Nationals, and Southfields High has a clear advantage over us …” My knee bounces under the table.

Aang puts his hand on it to steady it.

I look at him. Only one thing left to try. “Please?”

His eyes soften behind his glasses. “Okay.”

“Really?” I squeak.

“Yeah.”

Monique rolls her eyes. “Oh god.”

“Amazing!” I throw my hands up, knocking over my water bottle. I prepare for the deafening sound of the metal slamming down on the table. But Aang catches it before that happens.

“Here you go.” He gives me the bottle as his hand slides off my knee.

That’s not a big deal. We do cheerleading. At this point, his hands have touched my waist, my butt, my chest … honestly, every single part of my body. Whether by design or by accident. No reason I should be melting because he touched my knee.

“JJ?” He tilts his head.

I snap out, “Thank you,” and put the bottle down. “Thank you for the bottle and thank you for, you know, training with me and …”

“As long as you’re happy.” He smiles.

Warmth starts deep in my core and rises to my cheeks.

Monique gags.

We all look at her.

“Sorry, this burger is just disgusting.”

“I completely agree.” Remy also gags.

“You’re not eating a burger.” Aang points at his lasagna.

“What can I say?” Remy shrugs. “I’m an empath.”

“I think the burger is very tasty.” Bryn’s head is propped up on her hands as she winks at me. She’s also not eating a burger.

I turn my attention back to my food. Still tastes disgusting. But slightly less.

After the Mathletes meeting ends, I lean against the teacher’s desk. “Ready?” I ask Aang.

“Just let me pack.”

He takes his time organizing the papers. Geometry exercises. Notes on algebra. I look at his hands as they sift through the documents. Those scratched-up hands held me yesterday after I fell. He puts the papers in his backpack and zips it up. And they were on my knee at lunch today. He swings the backpack onto his shoulder. Would his hands feel rough pressed against my cheeks? What if they strayed lower, this time on purpose, not by accident?

He leans toward me, and my hands tighten on the desk. What is he doing? Is he going to …

Nope.

He bends down in front of me, picks up my backpack off the floor, and swings it onto his other shoulder. “Ready to go?”

My heart stills. “You don’t have to …” I weakly point to my backpack hanging off his shoulder.

“It’s okay. You looked so deep in thought. You’re prepping for the stunt, right?” He heads to the door.

I force a laugh. “Yeah … the stunt.” I follow him to the sports wing on wobbly legs.

Monique’s already waiting for us. Bryn texted me good luck, but she had to cover a shift at the salon. I knock on Coach’s door.

“It’s open!”

I peek my head through. “Hi, Coach. Aang, Monique, and I … we … um … sorry, I forgot a word …”

Aang pushes the door further open. “JJ, Monique, and I have been working on a partner stunt for the last few weeks, and we wanted to show you. We hope you’ll put it in the routine for State.”

Coach puts down her pen and grins. “That is so exciting! I’m so happy you’re more involved in cheer, Aang, and with JJ as well! What an amazing show of teamwork.” She claps, getting up. “Let’s go to the gym and see it!”

We change into sports clothes as Coach organizes the mats.

I tie and retie my left shoe. I tie my right only once. Monique and I do our cheer handshake, inherited in our sophomore year from the seniors. Left high five, right high five, grab each other’s elbows, slut drop.

It gives me enough courage to push open the locker room door and walk into the gymnasium.

We stand in front of an excited Coach, Aang behind me, Monique on my right side, ready to step in if necessary. I’m nauseous, the burger from lunch reminding me of himself. Itself. This isn’t Polish. Don’t gender your food.

“And five, six, seven, eight!”

Aang grabs my hips as I wrap my hands around his wrists. We dip on three, and he throws me up on five. I don’t reach his shoulders on seven. My stomach tightens.

“That’s okay. I didn’t expect it to work on the first try. Go again,” Coach instructs.

This time I’m too far forward.

And again. I dip at the wrong count.

And again. I bend my knees at the top.

On the fifth try, I’m on the brink of tears. It has to work. It has to work. It has to work.

I avoid looking at Coach, but she’s probably frowning, wondering why we’re wasting her time, even more sure of her decision not to let me fly …

“JJ and I need a quick break.” Aang grabs my hand and moves me away. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know. It’s just … it has to work. It has to work. It has to work.”

“Hey, hey.” He brushes the cornrows Bryn braided off my shoulders. “At the end of the day, it’s fine if it doesn’t work. We’ll find another way for you to fly.”

“We will?”

He squeezes my shoulders. “Isn’t that what I’m here for?”

“I thought you were here for Stanford.”

“Yeah, let’s not lie to ourselves anymore.” He rolls his eyes. “That wasn’t the biggest consideration.” His hands slide off my shoulders, and he walks back to his stunting position.

He did it for me?

“You coming?” He glances at me over his shoulder.

I’ll spiral later.

I jog up to him. “We’re ready, Coach.” I stand in front of Aang and give her my best cheerleading smile.

“And five, six, seven, eight!”

I bend my knees and squeeze my quads to get as much explosive power as I can. I tighten my core and don’t move a centimeter forward or backward as I go up. My feet land in Aang’s hands. We’re wobbly, but I stay in the air. I do a high V. Aang dips and lets me go. He catches my hips and lowers me gently. The second my feet touch the ground, I turn around and throw my arms around him. “We did it! We did it!” I let go of him and throw myself at Monique.

“I’m so happy you’re alive!” Monique lifts me off the ground. I let go of her and throw myself at Aang again. He squeezes me so tight, I can’t breathe. We peel apart when Coach starts clapping.

“I’m so proud of you! It’s, of course, not perfect, but we can work on it! And it’s great to see you all taking initiative.” She high-fives us. “I’ll think about where to put it in the routine over the weekend.”

She’s putting it in the routine.

She’s putting it in the routine.

She’s putting it in the routine.

Monique and I do our handshake again. I’m about to ask Aang if he still remembers ours, but Coach asks, “JJ, can I talk to you for a second?”

I follow her away from Monique and Aang.

“For now, I still want Addy to fly. But how about after State, if we win, of course, you start flying the rest of the stunts? I’m happy you took what I said on board.”

“Of course, Coach, you got it! Thank you!”

It’s enough. For now.

The parking lot’s nearly empty when we make it outside. We wave at Monique as she gets into her Mercedes. When she drives off, Aang gets into my used Honda Civic. “I cannot believe your parents bought you a car. I mean, I met them one time and still remember their tirade about how insane it is that teenagers drive in America.”

I switch on the car. “They changed their minds pretty quickly when they realized how much they’d have to drive me around. They thought I’d be able to take the bus everywhere like in Pol—” I stop myself. Poland is not ruining today. I shift into first gear with too much force.

Aang points to the stick. “Why are there numbers on this?”

I press the brake to stare at him. “Are you joking?”

“What? I’ve never seen this in a car before.”

“You’ve been in this car before.”

“But I was in the back. Remy was calling shotgun all the time.” He puts his seat belt on. “So what is it?”

Aang has never been more American than in this moment. But I don’t say that out loud, because it’d make him cry. And become obsessed with manual cars.

“It’s a manual transmission. Most cars here are automatic, so the gears change on their own. In this car, I shift the gears.” I adjust the clutch and press the gas to drive out of the parking lot.

“Why do you have it, then? It seems like a lot of hassle.”

“Because my parents claim you can’t drive a car unless you can drive a manual.”

He nods like it makes sense.

I park in front of his house twenty minutes later. He takes off his seat belt and turns his head toward me.

I meet his eyes. “Thank you. Really, thank you for talking me off the hedge there …”

A slow smile spreads across his face. The one he uses when I say something wrong. He thinks I don’t notice, but it’s pretty obvious. His reactions are actually what made me better at English. Freshman year, he was correcting me without realizing it.

But correcting myself now doesn’t seem as important as keeping going. “Thank you for agreeing to do the stunt, and suggesting we do the stunt, and joining cheerleading, and …” I’m running out of breath. “I owe you one.”

“Can I cash it in now?”

“Already? Is there a grave I have to dig out?”

He laughs softly. “Something like that.”

“Okay, then. What is it?”

He plays with the mini cheer bow hanging from the rearview mirror. “Why do you want it so much?”

My hands tighten on the wheel.

“The cheerleading and the flying … I won’t judge, I promise. I just want to know.”

We’ve never talked about these things before. I used to treat him the way I now treat Bryn and Monique, skirting around these topics. If I tell him, it’ll fundamentally change what this relationship is. But his eyes are soft, and he’s looking at me like he has all the time and patience in the world to listen. And maybe this friendship needs a change to last longer than it did the first time around.

I get ready to dig out the grave.

“I watched a lot of American high school films when I lived in Poland. And in all those films, cheerleaders were always surrounded by other people. It didn’t even matter to me that they were portrayed as mean girls most of the time. They walked around like they belonged, and no one questioned that they should be there.” I play with a gold hoop in one of my cornrows. “In Poland … people used to stare at me with that look on their face … like … what is this Black girl doing here? It made me want to disappear. Before I left the house, I would think, do I really have to go outside? Is it worth the constant stress of being … what’s the word … monitored? No, that’s not it, I don’t know …” I break off one of the hoops.

“Don’t ruin your hair.” His whole body is turned toward me. “I really like it.”

“Oh, okay.” I let go of the braid. My eyes are getting misty. “And then flying … it’s great. People stare because I ask them to. And they stare because I’m doing something worth looking at. In Poland, existing was enough of a circus.”

The silence that fills the car doesn’t help the flooding memories. The school. The bus. The gymnastics gym. The streets. They all pound against my skull. I turn to him, my eyes pleading for a distraction. “Would you like to share a traumatic experience, by any chance?”

He chuckles. “As long as it makes you happy.”

“Go on,then.”

He sighs, pushing his head against the headrest. “People always have questions. What do you eat at home? How do you say this or that in Chinese? But I have nothing to give them. I see the confusion in their eyes. Disappointment, even.” He balls his hands into fists. “I’m about to say something, and I know it’ll sound crazy …”

“No, it won’t.”

“It won’t?”

“I promise, it won’t.”

“Okay.” His hands relax. “Compared to those people? And their questions? I’ve always preferred the racists. At least with them, I knew I didn’t make it up—that I am part of the community, even when I feel completely cut off from it. Sometimes the lack … it hurts so much. But then some asshole yells at me on the street, and it’s like … they don’t care what I can speak, what I know. Because they see me as Asian without question.” He rubs his face. “Having your identity confirmed by the people who hate you for it. It’s so fucked up.”

That’s what it is. He put it into words for me.

I don’t have much connection to Nigeria. I’ve never been there. I don’t speak Kalabari. My name and a few dishes are the extent of my knowledge. But in Poland, my dad and I have always been Black first. People made sure we were Black first. And I didn’t quite realize until now how much it hurts to have a bond with my father—and a bond with a country that is half of me—be based on a foundation of other people’s hate.

Emotions float to the surface, bringing all the dirt with them. My eyes are filling with tears I did not consent to.

He misunderstands my silence. “I shouldn’t have said any of that. It was too much. I’m sorry.” He reaches for the car door. “I’m just gonna go.”

“Wait!” I grab the back of his shirt, the soft cotton bunching under my fingers. “Don’t go!” He stills, one hand on the door handle. “Can we be together? In silence. Just for a while. I-I would like that.”

His gaze flits to my hand holding on to the fabric. I grip the shirt harder. “Actually, scratch that. I need it. Please. I don’t want to be alone.”

He slowly settles back into his seat. I let go of his shirt and start shifting back into my seat.

He grabs my forearm. “Could you … maybe … come here?”

My heartbeat picks up, and without a thought, I climb over the gearbox. He moves over in his seat, but there’s not enough space for both of us, so half of me ends up in his lap.

“This doesn’t seem particularly comfortable,” he says.

“It’s not.”

One hand wrapped around my waist, he shifts me so I’m fully in his lap. He rests his head on my shoulder. “Is that better?”

His breath tickles my ear, and my eyes flutter closed. “I … what … yes.”

“Good.”

We sit in silence for what feels like hours. The scent of his ginger soap mixes with my vanilla perfume and our cheerleading sweat, and I sink even further into him. The steady rhythm of his breathing, the warmth of his skin against mine, the way my chest stops feeling tight …

I’m safe here.

My mind finally goes quiet in this small pocket of peace we’ve created.

Where the only identity is just us.